Amazon is the latest company to come under fire for misusing its browser extension bar, with security researcher Krzysztof Kotowicz accusing the company of invading privacy via its 1Button extension for Chrome.

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has issued a statement in which it all-but-rules-out Google's plan to take over some new top-level domains and offer them in “dotless” configurations that would enable web addresses like “http://search".

Our hearts went pitter-pat here on the Register exoskeletons, walkers and mighty roaring machinery desk just now, when we got a press release telling us that all our dreams had come true - or some of them anyway.

Microsoft has reached a milestone in its ongoing efforts to make personal productivity a cloudy caper, by switching on Office 365 available to users in 38 new markets and three new languages including Vietnamese and Malay.

El Reg’s review of the latest 13-inch MacBook Air comes in two parts: here, I take a look at one of the build-to-order configurations offered by Apple, which upgrades the standard 1.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of 1066MHZ mobile DDR3 RAM, 128GB solid-state drive specification to a 1.7GHz Core i7 machine with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.

For years now, Apple’s MacBook Air has held its own as the ultimate in portability, inspiring the PC market to follow suit with the Ultrabook marque. While not all Ultrabooks attempt to ape the Air’s slimline form factor, they draw from the same line of Intel CPUs and often beat the iconic Apple on cost.

A competitive strategist at Microsoft has told cloudy partners that competing with Google on price is proving to be commercial suicide, particularly in industries where firms are under financial constraint.

Some of the feeds and speeds of the Chinese government's Tianhe-2 massively parallel ceepie-phibie supercomputer leaked out in May and then even more came out a week later ahead of the planned big splash at the International Super Computing shindig in Leipzig, Germany. But El Reg has some juicy pics of some of the key components for you to ogle.

The Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team has just about recovered from last Saturday's successful test flight of the Special Project Electronic Altitude Release System (SPEARS) control board, which featured a dramatic attempt by our newly-recruited replacement Playmonaut to break the Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) world record for the highest launch of a paper plane.

These days, “tech” means anything except technology. The word has become so debased that a group of marketing people talking about their ideas for websites are a “tech scene”. And hosting meetings for marketing people to talk about websites in London in 2013 actually makes you a “tech entrepreneur”. The concerns of real engineering innovators take second place to the needs of the Magic Roundabout.

There isn't enough data to say with any certainty what will happen to sea levels around the world this century, and there is no "scientific consensus" to suggest that the rate of the seas' rise will accelerate dangerously.

Customers who want to fire up a Hadoop cluster on the Elastic MapReduce service offered by Amazon Web Services just got another distribution option. Oh yes. It's the MapR Technologies' full-tilt-boogie M7 Edition.

The ongoing rumor-fest over whether Apple will dump its longtime chip supplier Samsung and hook up with rival TSMC has taken yet another turn, with the latest report saying that, no, Apple isn't moving to TSMC for its A9 processor, scheduled for 2015, but is instead staying with Samsung.

The first release candidate of version 3.11 of the Linux kernel has arrived, and to commemorate the occasion, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has given the kernel a new codename and a new, Microsoft-inspired boot logo to match.

Security researchers have demonstrated a flaw in femtocells that allows them to be used for eavesdropping on cellphone, email, and internet traffic. The hack was demonstrated on Verizon hardware, and the telco giant has issued an update to patch the vulnerability, but up to 30 other network carriers use systems with software that can be hacked in the same way.

Apparently the "speed of thought" that Oracle cofounder and CEO Larry Ellison was bragging about when Big Red launched its Exalytics in-memory applianceback in October 2011 is no longer fast enough. And so Oracle is gussying it up with a memory upgrade and a flash card boost until it can get a new "Ivy Bridge-EX" version of the appliance out the door, perhaps early next year.

As the announcements and acquisitions which fall into the realms of Software Defined Storage – or "storage", as I like to call it – continue to come, one starts to ponder how this is all going to work in the real world.

Fanbois may need to revise this year's holiday shopping plans: Apple's long-anticipated iWatch appears to be slipping behind schedule, and so is the "Retina display" iPad mini. A pair of reports say that neither will appear until next year.

Google's head-mounted Glass computers may be the hipster fashion item of choice, but a pilot project by the Georgia Institute of Technology has built a system that uses them to communicate with our canine companions.